The last mountain run of Kalie McCrystal

The video that shows Kalie McCrystal near the very top of the Matterhorn, the sixth-highest peak in the Alps and one reserved for the most daring and skilled mountaineers, is thrilling and unnerving.

The 1:26-long clip was shot by a climber who was part of a small group of female climbers from Poland on Sept. 1 – a Tuesday. They encountered Kalie, 38, a lawyer and formidable skyrunner from Squamish, B.C., on her way to the Matterhorn’s crest at about 3:20 p.m. as they were on their way down.

The video starts close to the rugged rock face on the Italian side of the mountain. It shows the shadow of the climber, then pans to the left, revealing a near-vertical drop to the base of the Matterhorn. The camera picks up a figure below her, ascending with no climbing gear. She is wearing a black helmet, wrap-around sunglasses, a white vest over a black jacket, and black shorts. It is Kalie.

“How many people is with you?” the Polish climber asks as she descends, breathing heavily and dangling from multicoloured ropes.

“Just me,” Kalie says.

The video jerks around for a few seconds, then shows Kalie on a narrow ledge close to the woman. There are a few indistinct words but Kalie apparently asks how close to the peak she is.

“Ah, it’s close, but it’s late a little bit,” the Pole says. “But I think without the equipment it’s faster.”

The video shows Kalie above the climbers, pressing into the blue sky. She tells them that she will descend on the same route.

“So maybe see you, and good luck,” the Polish woman says.

“Thank you,” Kalie says.

The images of Kalie were the last recorded in her life. She went missing less than half an hour later that day.

In mid-September, after two weeks of searching, her younger sister, Jody McCrystal, and their mother, Wendy Cooper, declared her dead, though rescue searches had not been able to find her remains.

The Italian mountain-rescue teams know she made it to the peak and started her descent on the Italian side. They estimate that she fell a few minutes before 4 p.m., probably somewhere between 4,250 metres and 4,100 metres – not far below the 4,478-metre peak. She vanished without trace, leaving behind a mystery of what caused her fall, its direction and where her body landed.

The other mystery: How could a champion skyrunner make a fatal mistake? “It’s strange that someone with so much experience fell and disappeared,” Lucio Trucco, a seasoned mountain guide and member of the regional mountain-rescue service, Soccorso Alpino Valdostano, told The Globe and Mail in late September.

But his colleague, Paolo Comune, director of the service and the helicopter-rescue technician who was on the search flights for Kalie, said that the Matterhorn can be unforgiving for even the best mountaineers. “She was in a place where you can’t make mistakes,” he said.

Four mountaineers, including Kalie, have died on the Matterhorn this year. Since records began after the first-known ascent in 1865 about 600 climbers have not returned from the mountain alive.

Kalie’s disappearance came as a shock to Jody and Wendy, especially given her expertise in negotiating mountain trails and ridges at high altitudes.

What does not surprise them is that Kalie took calculated risks on risky mountains; she had an apparently unquenchable thirst for adventure. She had taken up paragliding over the past couple of years and competed in races called hike-and-fly, where athletes hike up a mountain with a paraglider chute in their backpack, unpack it at the peak and fly down.

Kalie was born in Nova Scotia and moved with her parents to Mission, B.C., just east of Vancouver, when she was two years old. She was raised by her mother, who was a teacher and later a school counsellor. From the onset, Kalie had a passion for sports, was highly competitive, and loved her independence. “Any sport or activity she did to a high level,” said Jody, who lives in England, working as school counsellor in East London. “And she knew from an early age that she wanted to get out of our small town and see the world.”

Kalie excelled at swimming, volleyball, soccer, cross-country running, track and field, and snowboarding. She lived in Mission until age 18, and studied sports psychology at the University of British Columbia before pursuing a law degree, specializing in international arbitration and intellectual property. During her high-school and university years, she kept her sports devotion intact and saved money for travel. At about age 20, she worked as a shepherd in New Zealand. “She was incredibly driven and was always working towards something,” Jody said. “If she wanted to do something, she wouldn’t let anything hold her back.”

At some point after her university years, she discovered trail running. “This sport brought a lot of things together for her,” Jody said. “She was always searching for a sport that she could excel in and trail running brought together her endurance with technical ability. But I think it was the friendship and community she found in trail running that really drew her in. She was among people who understood her and shared her drive.”

Kalie moved to Squamish in her early 30s. Some time later, she discovered a spin-off sport called skyrunning, which took trail running to a more intense level.

Skyrunning was pioneered in Italy in the early 1990s. It is a running discipline that favours endurance athletes skilled enough to handle twisty, steep, rock-studded routes. The races are generally run at elevations of 2,000 metres or higher, with at least 5 per cent of the course having an incline of 30 per cent or more – the upper stretches of the Matterhorn are 35 to 45 degrees before going nearly vertical. The races are usually 20 to 45 kilometres long and usually take three to eight hours to complete. The finishing time must less than 16 hours.

Unlike traditional mountain climbers, to save weight, skyrunners climb without ropes or belaying equipment – a mechanical device attached to a rope that acts as a friction brake. They rely on chains and ropes already attached to the mountain to tackle the steepest parts. The downside is that they are not protected from falls if they make a wrong move.

Jody never considered Kalie a thrill seeker in spite of her pursuit of sports that, to an outsider, seem crazy dangerous. “She just never shied away from sports that were a challenge,” she said. “She believed in herself and kept testing herself.”

In her 30s, Kalie became one of the top-ranked skyrunners in the world. In early 2025, she, in effect, made mountain sports her priority by converting her senior associate role at Vancouver’s Borden Ladner Gervais law firm to consultant. “She reassessed her life,” Jody said. “She realized that being a corporate lawyer was not her whole purpose. She wanted more time for adventure.”

Kalie’s Instagram feed is full of images of her training, racing and outright beaming at high altitudes. She typically ranked among the top five in races in the Skyrunner World Series, including first place this summer in Argentina’s 4 Refugios Non-Stop, a gruelling event with about 3,500 metres of elevation gain; and fourth place in the Trofeo Kima race in northern Italy, which covered 52 kilometres and 4,200 metres of elevation gain.

On Aug. 7 she posted a photo of herself atop the Matterhorn, after a training run aimed at setting a record for a woman’s skyrunning climb and descent. She is wearing a green windbreaker. It’s a wild, beautiful image. The peak protrudes into the sun and the clouds. Her left hand holds the frame of the tall metal cross attached to the peak; her right arm is outstretched in the other direction in a gleeful victory pose as she arches her body away from the cross. If she had lost her grip, there is little doubt she would have plummeted straight down.

Next to the image, she set out her goal, which was, she said to “go up and down the Matterhorn in under 5 hours via Lion’s Ridge,” referring to the normal route taken by climbers on the mountain’s Italian side. By tradition, the route starts at the distinctive white church in the centre of Breuil-Cervinia and passes over Pic Tyndall, a secondary peak about 230 metres below the Matterhorn’s crest.

She assured her Instagram followers that she was being careful. The day before, she had aborted a practice run after an overnight storm. “I was not about to solo a new route on wet rock and zero vis and a real risk of rock fall,” she wrote. “So I bailed. Even I have limits.”

Kalie was determined to take another practice run up the Matterhorn. On Sept. 1, she went out of her way to do so, as if breaking the women’s skyrunning record for the mountain had become an obsession. She had spent the night in Milan, rode a bus for three or four hours to Breuil-Cervinia and checked into her hotel, the Petit Palais, probably in the late morning.

Instead of unpacking and calling it a day, she changed into her athletic gear, found the church and began her climb. She ran into the Polish climbers near the peak and kept going. At the summit, she was spotted by a Swiss mountain-rescue team, which kept a telescope trained on the Matterhorn as a matter of routine. She was seen again by the Polish climbers at about 3:45 p.m., by which time she was descending quickly, about 200 metres below the summit. The weather was near perfect at the time.

Then nothing.

Two days later, on Sept. 3, Jody received a call from Kalie’s close American-French friend, Hillary Gerardi, a well-known skyrunner who sometimes trained and competed with Kalie.

“Hillary asked me if I had heard from my sister,” Jody said. “I hadn’t. We thought that maybe she had just lost her phone, or was in bed sick in her hotel room.”

Gerardi later told The Globe that she and Kalie were supposed to do a long-distance trail-running race in Corsica called the GR20. Kalie’s silence worried her and she called the Guardia di Finanza, the semi-military Italian finance police that operates a mountain-rescue service and works closely with the regional mountain-rescue team in the Matterhorn area.

On Sept. 4, Jody, from England, and her mother Wendy, from B.C., were on flights to Italy. By sheer coincidence, they found a room at the Petit Palais, the same hotel Kalie had checked into three days earlier. The Guardia di Finanza investigators had entered Kalie’s room before Jody and Wendy arrived and found her luggage on the bed, unopened, and her Canadian passport. “We saw the enormous Matterhorn peak right in front of the hotel and it looked terrifying to us,” Jody said. “We were still clinging to the hope that she was alive but injured.”

The Italian rescue service began helicopter missions. They started with a big helicopter, then used a small one capable of hovering closer to the mountain face. They later used drones, which could get within a metre or so of the rock face and the deep crevices to look for scraps of clothing or traces of blood. Both the Italian and Swiss sides of the Matterhorn were searched.

On Sept. 6, Jody and her mother took a flight on one of the small helicopters. “They offered to take us up to give us an understanding of how hard it was to find someone who had fallen,” Jody said. “The sheer drops, we just felt sick looking at them.”

By then, Kalie’s family had pretty much lost hope that she would be found alive. The Guardia di Finanza, with the help of the RCMP officer at the Canadian embassy in Rome, tried to find her last location using data from her phone. Valerio Segor, director of civil protection for the Aosta Valley, said that “triangulation” from the Italian and Swiss cellphone towers indicated that Kalie probably fell on the Italian side, but there was insufficient data to reveal her precise location. Her phone last pinged a cell tower at 4:18 p.m., though it’s entirely possible that she fell before that time.

Rescue teams know that the vast majority of climbers who fall near the peak get killed, and that their bodies often go unrecovered. The sheer speed and length of the fall over jagged rocks means the bodies can get ripped apart. Only a piece of the arm of the Finnish mountain guide who vanished on the Matterhorn at the end of July – his name has never been published – was found.

Still, the mystery of what happened to Kalie remains. “Normally, we find a jacket, a shoe, a trace of blood, something to indicate where they fell,” said Comune, the director of the local rescue service. “This time we found nothing, and she could have fallen on either the Italian or Swiss side from a ridge.”

Kalie’s family was grateful for the rescue team’s thorough search effort and their empathy. They had hoped to bring her back to B.C. Gerardi called Kalie “an exceptional person and I feel so lucky to have known her.”

Jody and her mother are grieving and have launched the Kalie McCrystal Memorial Fund at UBC to help students, possibly athletic ones (the McCrystal family is still working out the parameters). “We take comfort that she died in the mountains, doing what she loved doing,” Jody said.